David Cone’s one imperfect moment came before his perfect game 15 years ago Friday, after Don Larsen had thrown out the ceremonial first pitch to his 1956 World Series batterymate Yogi Berra on Yogi Berra Day.
“The one thing I do remember saying was to Don Larsen right after he threw out the first pitch … I asked him if he was gonna run and jump in Yogi’s arms to recreate their scene,” Cone said at the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation Golf & Tennis Classic at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club. “And he said, ‘You got it wrong, kid. He jumped into my arms.’
“I actually got it wrong. I felt … about this tall,” Cone said with a laugh.
Twenty-seven Expos batters and 27 outs later, Cone felt as tall as the Empire State Building.
What follows is the Anatomy of a Perfect Game, 15 years later. A 6-0 perfect-game victory that nearly ended after one out, when Paul O’Neill was forced to make a diving catch of a Wilton Guerrero fly to right.
“It looked like a triple off the bat to me,” Cone recalled. “Guerrero hit it, and he’s got a lot of speed, so I was looking to back up third base at that point. O’Neill kind of got a pretty good jump on it, and made a nice catch.”
Then came a 33-minute rain delay after Cone, in 98-degree swelter, struck out the side in the third inning.
“It was a steamy day in The Bronx, so it was easy for me to keep my arm loose,” Cone said.
He played catch with Luigi, the Yankees ballboy.
“In the bowels of Yankee Stadium, skipping ’em off the [ceiling],” Cone said, and chuckled.
By the middle innings, in the time-honored baseball superstition, teammates avoided Cone like the plague in the dugout.
“Chili Davis came out in between innings to warm me up,” Cone said. “And I was just kinda lobbing them in to him, not wanting to throw too hard, and he got on me in the middle innings. He said, ‘You know I used to catch in the minor leagues. I can catch your stuff. Let it go.’ ”
Otherwise, the silence was deafening.
“Chili was the only one that talked to me in the middle of the game, that said anything to me,” Cone said. “I would walk up to the clubhouse in the locker room in between innings and change my undershirt — the little routine that I had — even the clubhouse kids, anybody in there, just left. So I had the whole clubhouse to myself.”
And by now, thoughts of perfection.
“Once you get through five clean innings, the thoughts start to creep in,” Cone said. “After the sixth inning, it was like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
There were conflicting voices singing inside Cone’s head.
“It was a sports psychiatrist’s kind of a Class 101 — it was negative thoughts and positive thoughts going both ways,” Cone said. “It was, ‘You can do this,’ and the other part was, ‘Don’t blow it.’ So it was a constant battle of, ‘Don’t get too far ahead of yourself — you still have to win the game, you still have a few more innings to go,’ but with each out and each inning, that anxiety kinda grew.”
He would throw just 88 pitches. Not one ball three.
“His stuff was almost like Wiffle-ball stuff,” recalled Michael Kay, John Sterling’s radio sidekick that day.
It was the eighth inning now and second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who terrified fans seated behind first base with his scattershot throws, made a pretty backhand stab and threw a strike to Tino Martinez to get Jose Vidro.
“Probably the loudest cheer of the day,” Cone said. “It looked like a base hit up the middle. The crowd really reacted to that play as if that was kinda the saving play late in the game.”
Three outs from immortality.
“What’s going on inside my gut is how many times I’d been close before, even going back to the Mets, in a position to do this,” Cone said. “We all wanted to be the first guy to throw a no-hitter for the Mets back in the day. I just remember thinking, ‘This is probably the last chance I’m gonna have to do something like this. I’m 36 years old, it’s later in my career. This is it. This is a gift.’ ”
The Stadium — 41,930 strong — stood and cheered Cone as he headed to the mound.
“It’s nerve-racking,” Martinez said. “Any ball hit at you, an error loses the perfect game. A bad play, the no-hitter’s gone, so you’re really, really out there just really focusing as hard as you can to try to make every play possible.”
No cheering in the press box. Until now.
“That was the first time I would think that any pitcher who was trying to do something or any professional athlete who was trying to do something, I think everybody in the press box was rooting for him,” Kay said, “’cause everyone liked him, ’cause he made our jobs easier.”
Manager Joe Torre, who had removed Cone three years earlier after seven no-hit innings in Oakland because it was his comeback from a career-threatening aneurysm, expected history from Cone now on the manager’s 59th birthday.
“You get to the ninth inning, you know he’s gonna do it at that point in time,” Torre said.
Cone struck out Chris Widger, his 10th K, and up stepped pinch-hitter Ryan McGuire. Cone shook catcher Joe Girardi off once all day, right here.
“I threw a fastball strike one, and then Girardi wanted to call a cutter in, which is a pattern that we always used throughout that game, really throughout our career, and I shook him off to throw another fastball because the first one I threw felt so good, I wanted to do it again,” Cone said, “and I ended up missing up and away with a ball and falling behind 2-and-1 on that particular sequence. That was the only time I shook him off and I was wrong.”
McGuire lofted a fly to short left that Ricky Ledee nearly dropped.
“That was scary,” Cone said, “because you could tell that he lost it, in probably some white shirts in the seats at Yankee Stadium that day. The ball kinda found his glove the way that his glove snapped back when the ball hit it.”
One out from immortality, adrenaline rushed through Cone.
“I keep using this expression: I could feel my hair growing,” Cone said. “My head was on fire. You’re so anxious to get it done, but at the same time you’re fighting just to contain yourself to keep a sense of rhythm and tempo going. But you’re still so anxious just to make the one pitch that’s gonna get this thing over with.”
Orlando Cabrera popped to third baseman Scott Brosius in foul territory. Cone fell to his knees, then held his head in disbelief.
“Nothing was thought about beforehand, it was just sort of a reaction to … ‘Wow! I finally did it, after all these years, being so close so many times,’ ” Cone said. “I didn’t really know how to react. I think, maybe in the back of my mind, I saw a Wimbledon final one time where a tennis player … did that, he dropped to his knees when I was a kid watching. I don’t really know where it came from. I was exhausted, probably, more than anything.”
Girardi pulled Cone down on top of him.
“He said that he wanted me on the bottom of the pile to protect me — I don’t know how being on the bottom of the pile protects me — but I appreciate his thought,” Cone said. “He was looking out for me.”
Girardi was front and center as the Yankees lifted Cone, who thrust his hands skyward as he was carried toward the dugout.
“I remember his face being all really bright red, like he was gonna have a stroke,” Kay said.
Cone celebrated with David Wells, who had thrown a perfect game 14 months earlier, and teammates that night in Manhattan.
“I just remember almost going till the sun came up,” Cone recalled.
He will have a chance to watch his perfect game again when YES airs it after Friday night’s postgame show as part of its “Yankeeography: Memories of the Game” series.
“I’ve never really sat down and watched the whole thing probably since in the aftermath of that game,” Cone said.
Happy anniversary.
“It means a lot because the further removed I get from it, the more I appreciate it, and people remember that, they remember that day,” Cone said, “and to have a signature moment like that means so much because fans remember that day … probably more than me. They remember where they were, they remember who they were with … grandfathers and grandsons on the beach in Jersey somewhere listening on the radio. When I hear so many stories like that, it makes me much more appreciative of what happened.”